No More Mandatory Beige Boxes

Privatization involves a conscious public decision to shift a public function to some form of private payment or delivery. This would imply that public officials would consider various approaches and specific plans, evaluate the costs and benefits, consult experts, hold public hearings, and decide to privatize. In the case of [common ownership development] housing, this decision was never made. Instead, the move toward privatization was a matter of inaction. It was de facto privatization; it was done over decades, without a public discussion of whether it should take place; it happened not by government action, but by inaction, as private developers gradually transferred local government functions to private corporations. The risks and benefits of various approaches were never calculated and presented to the public for a decision. Although millions of Americans have purchased units of CID housing, they have done so without realizing that they were to become part of a collective decision to privatize local government, and without knowing the implications of that decision.
—Evan McKenzie, 1994

In fact, the uniform beige town of Cary, NC, establishes that — with no ‘help’ from home ‘owners’ associations — a local government can dictate petty restrictions, including color restrictions, with zoning and eyesore ordinances that can be as persnickety as the deed restrictions developers record to create HOAs.

Living in a mandatory homeowners’ association means giving up a part of the American dream. It means giving up Constitutional rights and control over one’s most valuable asset — one’s home.

Living in a mandatory homeowners’ association means leaving the American Zone!

According to University of Illinois Professor Evan McKenzie, “there are three ways [the] priority of rules over community manifests itself, all of which relate to what it means to be a citizen of these subsocieties, and these factors tend to undermine any claim to legitimacy under principles with which Americans are familiar:

“1. There is serious question regarding whether there is any meaningful consent to the rules of these subsocieties.

“2. The concept of ‘rights’ is replaced with the idea of ‘restrictions’ as the guiding principle in the relationship of the individual to the community.

“3. The concept of responsibility to the community is defined as nothing more than meeting one’s economic obligations and conforming to the rules ....”1

According to two sociologists, “Common interest homeowners’ associations have rule enforcement powers that are commonly exercised in ways that are offensive to normal conceptions of due process of law and the separation of powers. The association board passes rules, prosecutes violators, and then judges the guilt or innocence of the people involved.” 2

Richard Louv wrote, in America II, “Sometime during this decade, the shelter revolution will be complete. It will have happened quietly. No shot will have been fired, but the American notions of private property, privacy, local government – and that part of the American dream symbolized by the single–family suburban home – will have been permanently altered.”

‘Our representatives’ have ignored them all, while collecting campaign contributions (bribery) from trade associations that represent businesses that get that money from homebuyers and homeowners, by creating and servicing HOAs.

‘Our representatives’ have opted for willful blindness, rather than consider whether this quiet housing revolution is in the public’s best interest, to avoid biting the hand that feeds them (moneyed, organized special interests).

When ‘our representatives’ are not looking the other way, they are opportunistically bending over backwards to confer legislative beneficence on the industry, bending their constituents over forwards.